We live in the midst of an industry rife with buzzwords. In many ways,
these quick phrases are the coin of the marketing realm; they are words that press
some personal hot button, driving us inexorably toward the purchase of the
latest and greatest technological device. They're powerful tools,
but the use of these buzzwords often serves only to blur the line between
new device types.

Take, for example, the current hot word used to describe mobile computers,
notebooks. Every major manufacturer has a notebook in its product
line. The word itself, it seems, is evolutionary, derived from the
concept of a laptop computer. Notebook says to the consumer,
“I'm
smaller than an unwieldy old laptop, small enough to take you back to
your college days and those indispensable collections of paper bound
together with thin spiral wire.”

As is so often the case, the success of the word notebook has led to its
widespread misuse. You'd be hard pressed to find a major manufacturer
carrying a line of laptops these days.
The notebook imagery is too powerful, leaving
manufacturers with little choice but to throw the old laptop description
in the dustbin. Even if the device weighs in at better than five pounds,
it sells better as a notebook than it ever will again as a laptop.

Fortunately, some real notebooks are on the market that serve
to clear the confusion. These are devices that provide congruence between
the notebook imagery and its reality. Lying somewhere between a PDA and
a laptop, notebooks fulfill a critical niche for users weary of
lugging the old laptop through airports and hotel lobbies. One device
in particular, the EmperorLinux Meteor Notebook, has re-established the
descriptive value of the notebook buzzword. With dimensions and weight
that rival some of my own college notebooks, the Meteor is Linux-ready
and built to travel for any savvy computer user.

Built around the Sharp Actius MM10, the Meteor is the smallest
fully functional notebook I've yet seen. Weighing in at a mere 2.1lbs
(with battery), it's light enough for even the most wrist-weary mobile
worker. With a thickness of .52", the real danger is it
may become lost in the soft-sided leather briefcase I've used for years to carry
my laptops. The moment I pulled the Meteor from its box, I knew it
held real promise to reclaim the notebook buzzword for what it really
should be.

In its factory configuration, the Meteor is
marketed and installed by Sharp as a Microsoft
Windows machine. Filling a valuable niche in
the mobile market, EmperorLinux converts these
notebooks and replaces the original OS with Red
Hat 9. The match of the two components is nearly perfect,
providing an extremely usable Linux desktop
and application set. The 2.4.2x Linux kernel is custom
configured in the EmperorLinux shop to provide
such mobile-valuable features as software
hibernation.
EmperorLinux does provide the
Meteor with a minimal DOS installation for legacy
users, allowing GRUB to handle the bootloading
tasks.

Clearly, some trade-offs are made in the Meteor for the sake of size. I
anticipated that its screen and keyboard size might make it difficult
to use. Even my current laptop, a Dell Inspiron 1100, has a 14"
screen and a keyboard that approximates the size and feel of a desktop
computer. Surely, I thought, that look and feel couldn't be replicated on
a device so small.
But upon
investigation, the 10.1" XGA
LCD screen is bright and sharp, offering far better contrast than my Dell
or many of the other laptops I've seen and used. Running at a resolution
of 1024×768, the display is surprisingly easy on the eyes, suitable even
for graphics manipulation in The GIMP. With the anti-aliasing support in
Red Hat 9, I quickly came to prefer the Meteor over the Dell. The display
and feel vs. size compromise turns out to be hardly a compromise at all.

The keyboard, although undeniably tight, retains
much of the feel of a laptop. In other words,
with regular use, it's quite easy to make the
adjustment from desktop to notebook. I made it
without a hitch, even with the dexterity
of a corn-fed Iowan, manual dexterity that's often
compared to that of our primary export—hogs. The
lone exception was the location of the touchpad. It
took some mental training to avoid tapping the pad
with my thumb and unexpectedly launching an application.

On the hardware side, a little more ground is given
for the sake of the Meteor's compact size. Although
these may present some small aggravations to
hard-core coders, my sense is they are not
the target market for the Meteor. With a 1GHz
Transmeta Crusoe processor, the Meteor does feel
perceptibly slower than my regular laptop when compiling
and installing applications.
The latest release of OpenOffice.org took nearly
twice as long to install on the Meteor as it did on the 2GHz
Celeron-equipped Dell laptop. However, the Crusoe
architecture left little discernible difference
in execution speed for most applications. Once
compiled and installed, OpenOffice.org seemed to run
as easily and as quickly on the Meteor as it did on any other platform
in my home. My other killer mobile application, Mozilla,
opened and churned through pages and images with
the ease of a much more powerful desktop.

With 256MB of fixed DDR RAM and a 15GB hard drive, the Meteor once
again has hit the sweet spot for most users. That there's not more RAM or
storage space is, ultimately, a fair trade for making this device as
small and mobile as it is. I missed neither when trading my daily use
of the Dell laptop for the Meteor.

Figure 1. Meteor ports include USB and FireWire.

If you're of the personality type that is inextricably trapped in those
marketing buzzwords I mentioned, let me give you a new one to distinguish
the Meteor from the current crop of notebooks, ultra-mobile.
For starters, the Meteor comes equipped with built-in Wi-Fi. With the
installed Red Hat networking tools, it's a simple task to set up a Wi-Fi
DHCP connection and start surfing or checking e-mail within a matter of
minutes. No hot spot close by? No problem. The Meteor also features a
built-in 10/100 Ethernet port or, at worst, a PCMCIA slot into which
you can slide a modem card. When you put that diversity of connections
in its proper perspective—that is, a device a half-inch thick—the
Meteor easily deserves the ultra-mobile label.

The custom kernel configuration EmperorLinux provides unlocks some
other great hardware features in the Meteor. The notebook provides
FireWire and USB capabilities, with one and two ports respectively. The
Meteor also features a unique USB-connected vertical docking cradle. This
feature allows a user to share the notebook's hard drive with a desktop
system or to sync
data between the desktop and notebook with ease, even when the notebook
is powered down. With the Meteor off, I placed it in the cradle. This
assigned the drive to /dev/sdb. I then was able to mount the drive at
/mnt/meteor and the /home partition at /mnt/meteor/home. With this
completed, I moved data between the machines effortlessly from the
command line. I also completed these tasks by opening multiple instances
of Nautilus, in effect dragging and dropping data from one machine to
the other.

Figure 2. The Meteor Syncing from Its Cradle to a Desktop

In short, the real strengths of the EmperorLinux Meteor are many. It's
highly mobile, with the capability to connect to the network across
the full range of options. With Wi-Fi becoming increasingly pervasive,
the Meteor/Red Hat combination provides both built-in hardware and easy
configuration for connecting to the nearest hot spot. The custom kernel
relieves even a newbie user from the pain of unlocking all the built-in
hardware features. And the sync/storage capabilities provided by the
USB docking station are the quickest path to taking your data on the road.

If those features don't fill your bill, consider the documentation provided by
EmperorLinux. Though a thin book, it provides step-by-step guidance for
setting up and using the most critical features of the Meteor. Unlike
some manufacturer-provided documents, the Meteor documentation is
kept current with the version of Linux in use in the Meteor. It also
features custom kernel-specific information for those who are technically
inclined. The documentation is exactly enough, without being too much.

You might think I found the Meteor to be without flaws, but that's not
quite
true. The flaws, however, are not show-stoppers. As expected, they're
related in large part to the size of the Meteor. There is no built-in
CD-ROM, although you can connect one to a USB port.
As I've already noted, the touchpad
placement is a bit awkward. I've never been a big believer in the
mouse nubbin found on some laptops, but the size of the Meteor would make it a
good candidate for such a pointing device. The processor is a bit too slow
to push the Meteor into the class of machine necessary for developers and
coders. Despite its power-miser Transmeta Crusoe processor, the Meteor
sucks down a battery like a script kiddie sucks down a Big Gulp. On
average, I could expect less than two hours of battery life before breaking
out the power cord. The built-in Wi-Fi always is on,
regardless of whether it has a connection, which adds to the power
requirements and diminishes battery life. Finally, at $1,700 US, you
actually might find the small Meteor a bit bigger than your wallet. Even at
that price, it's a good investment of time and money for the enterprise.

Figure 3. Its small size makes the Meteor a true notebook.

So, let's refine our marketing-speak a bit. Laptop does not equal
notebook. The Meteor Notebook is proof of that, it being the only Linux-equipped
device truly to fill the notebook bill. Call it an ultra-mobile if you
must, but the Meteor surely will redefine how you hear the notebook
marketing message from now on.

Tony Steidler-Dennison is a freelance PHP programmer and technology
consultant who frequently writes about mobile Linux technologies. His
Weblog, “Frankly, I'd Rather Not” (steidler.net), covers topics
from technology to politics. Tony's other on-line presence, uptime
(uptime.steidler.net), focuses on Linux for new users. He's
currently writing his first book, Practical Linux
Administration, and
gladly discusses Linux-related topics at tony@steidler.net.

I've bought one of these. The EmperorLinux guys installed Fedora Core 2 on it. I love it! Works perfectly. I'm using the EmperorLinux 2.6.7 kernel, GNOME desktop. I get about 260fps from glxgears, and 3D games work fine.

If you buy a Meteor, David Cafaro did a great writeup on getting Fedora Core 2 working swimmingly.

About the slowness of installing OpenOffice.org, I bet this is really due to hard disk speed more that CPU.